LesEnfantsTerribles wrote...
Thankfully, I feel that this was addressed in LotSB, especially if Liara is Shepard's LI. One of the criticisms of the retail version of ME2 and it's narrative is that Shepard's death is seemingly brushed aside, and trivialised into a meaningless plot device and gameplay mechanic. I feel that this was epitomised during the confrontation with Nassana Dantius, where Shepard responds to her shocked reaction with a blase "I got better". It's as if she is not particularly bothered by the fact that she was killed, and then resurrected. However, during Liara's ME2 romance scene in which she emotionally laments Shepard's death, the Commander repeats the above line that she used during the confrontation with Nassana. It's like a reprise, and a flashback to Shepard's indifference and the trivialisation of her death.
Bearing in mind that I'm not a huge fan of the death/resurrection start of ME2, I mostly disagree with this.
I don't think that Shepard's death from Shepard's point of view is necessarily problematic for her. She made an unpleasant exit from the old Normandy, then she woke up on a medical table nearly fully intact and ready for action. From her point of view, dying was probably like taking a serious hit on the battlefield: it hurt, she went unconscious, she woke up in the doc's office. Not pleasant, but part of her line of work, and something she's mentally prepared to deal with. In fact, she might not even believe she was really dead, just seriously injured. If you woke up in a strange hospital and Cerberus told you that you had been dead for two years and that somehow, they, an avowed enemy of yours, had worked a miracle and resurrected you, would you believe them? It doesn't seem likely.
Nor do I think that it's unrealistic for the rest of the universe to be relatively unsurprised by Shep's reappearance. After all, if anyone is going to fake their death and disappear for two years, it's going to be a Spectre. Shepard was a hero and a celebrity at the end of ME1. It seems like it would be hard to be a badass undercover operative of the Council when you're famous. Thus, her flippancy with Nassana was perfectly appropriate: In front of Nassana, she's going to play it Spectre cool. I think Shep's answer was her implying, in a smart-assed and deceptive sort of way, that Nassana's intel on the subject of Shep's health was inaccurate.
Thus, the only people who would really feel Shep's death at the visceral level were the people who saw her die: the old Normandy crew, basically. This seems to me to be reflected in the game. Tali, Garrus, Liara, Wrex, and the VS all have fairly emotional reactions to finding out Shepard is alive. The rest of the galaxy, not so much.
That being said, I agree that the old crew should have questioned Shep more closely about what happened to her, and Shep's explanations could have been much, much better. Shepard never once states forcefully that she was completely unconscious and out of action for the entire time she'd been gone and that she didn't desert everyone and/or spend all that time becoming a Cerberus sympathizer. It's like her dialog was written to be purposefully ambiguous about the subject of her death and time away, to make sure that whoever she's talking to had at least some justification to be suspicious of her.